The summer of the Comic-book movie continues this weekend with the launch of Wanted an adaptation of Mark Miller’s over the top graphic novel about a wimp who gets turned into an amoral, masochistic Super Villain. I had never heard of this book until the movie was announced last year. So I saw the film cold. I walked out of the theater being mixed, on the one hand Russia action director Timur Bekmambetov channels his inner Woo to bring us some amazing action sequences on the other the acting is all over the place. No matter how much Hollywood wants it to be true, James McAvoy doesn’t have the “It” factor. He’s ok in small doses but he just lacks charisma. Last year Timur floored me with the amazing, over the top Day Watch – if you are an action fan, you must see this. But all the elements that made Day watch so amazing, don’t work in Wanted.

Maybe it’s because he’s trying too hard to be noticed here. Timur obviously wants this to be his calling card film and grab Hollywood by the balls and scream “Pay Attention to me!” The problem is he’s saddled with McAvoy and a bad story featuring a bunch of characters that not only do you not like, but actively HATE. This is where reading the comic book was a mistake. As I said, the film left me feeling ambivalent, reading the book made me want to shower. The book is that vile and disgusting. Like Timur, it’s Miller trying so desperately to be controversial. The problem is there’s no story just a bunch of panels with people saying fuck you, killing and raping everything in view. He’s not making the social statement that he thinks he is. He’s being a ten year old little boy who discovers the word fuck for the first time.

The Producers of Wanted wisely just kept the name, the characters and some of the attitude from the book for the film. Instead of trying to join a league of Super Villains, Wesley (McAvoy) is recruited by the hot and dangerous Fox (Angelina Jolie who is obviously enjoying herself in this) to take his father’s place in a Fraternity of Assassins lead by the enigmatic Sloan (Morgan Freeman).

The plot, what little there is, is used to showcase Timur. In Day Watch there is this eye popping moment where one of the female characters tears through Russia in this hot Red Viper doing some amazing things including driving straight up a building and crashing through the top floor. Incredible moment in the film, he repeats it in Wanted. Only this time it’s Jolie driving the Viper in a spectacular chase sequence. The problem is, I didn’t care about the characters or what was going on and I already watched this scene in Day Watch, so it lacked the wow factor. In the first half of the film there are several CGI cartoon shots of McAvoy in slow motion with his face jiggling all over the place. It was neat once, but by the 3^rd time I was ready to see something else.

Wanted isn’t nearly as vile as the book and it’s certainly watchable, but it’s the first Comic Book film of the summer that fails to hit its mark.

Final Grade C-

EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 6.29.2008

I went in to Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem expecting a terrible film. After all, the first one [on which I burned a free DVD rental coupon] was hideous beyond belief [so much so that I couldn’t believe that Uwe Boll hadn’t directed it]. I was in the mood for a big screen bonanza of senseless violence and mayhem – especially since this AvP edition carried an R rating. To my extreme disappointment, it was a decent enough timewaster.

“No peace on Earth,” scream the posters and trailers, somewhat hyperbolically. In actuality, the only place suffering from the no peace at all is a small town in middle America, which has the misfortune of having Aliens [one of which is the Alien/Predator hybrid from the last film] break free of their confinement.

The pilot of the craft takes out several before he is slain in battle – barely getting off an S.O.S. to his homeworld. In response, the granddaddy of all Predators blasts of for Earth. Meanwhile, the newly freed aliens have disrupted the lives of a man and his son who were hunting deer near where the Predator craft went down.

The town of Gunnison, CO [a real place, by the way] is the film’s setting. As small towns go, it comes with the usual complement of stock characters: the sheriff [John Ortiz], a former rebellious teen; Dallas [Stephen Pasquale], the sheriff’s former cohort who is just back in town from serving time; Dallas’ younger brother, Ricky [Johnny Lewis], who lusts after Jesse [Kristin Hager] and beaten up by jock/bullies Dale [David Paetkau] and friends; Kelly O’Brien [Reiko Aylesworth], a chopper pilot just home from a tour in Iraq, and her daughter, Molly [Ariel Gade], and a host of others.

When the PredAlien [as the website calls it] brings its friends to town, the usual face-hugging and chest-bursting begins to occur. The ensuing mayhem takes place at night, and is made worse by the inadvertent destruction of the local power station – plunging the town into darkness.

With all these stock characters and situations set before us, why isn’t AvPR as awful as its predecessor? Perhaps it’s because the film’s writer [Shane Salerno] and directors [The Brothers Strause] are fans of both original movie series and their delight at being able to play in that milieu comes through in the way they juggle several character arcs and plot points with dexterity. Toss in scenes with the Big Honkin’ Predator frying, scrambling or just dissolving the PredAlien’s children – and working toward a big showdown; a military colonel promising survivors an airlift to safety, and a small group [led by O’Brien] who think the military is lying, and you’ve got plenty of action and tension.

The Brothers Strause seem far better able to use darkness and shadow to create mood than Paul W.S. Anderson [who seems to have wasted his small range of competence on the third Resident Evil flick], and the Salerno script far exceeds Anderson’s in terms of establishing character and maintaining emotional as well as action points. Unfortunately, there are too many characters and monsters to really allow any of them to become truly gripping in an hour-and-a-half.

The result is that Aliens vs. Predator – though much better than its predecessor – is just an average big screen skiffy flick with horror overtones. If the same team were to collaborate on the inevitable sequel [rather nicely set up at the end, by the way], and tighten things up, plot and character-wise, there’s no reason the next film couldn’t be quite good.

Final Grade: C+

I’ll admit it, I’ve never been much of a fan of Denzel Washington, he’s a great actor but for some reason he just never did it for me. But in American Gangster Denzel captivates and hold the screen. He’s both charming and disarmingly deadly at the same time. I generally love gangster films but hate the over glorification of the lifestyle. Never once in AG did I feel American Gangster glorified Denzel’s Frank Lucas.

Lucas is cold and calculating, but exudes a quiet charisma. He’s smart enough to build his empire while avoiding the trappings of the Gangster lifestyle. Yes he has the fabulous houses, but he dresses in drab, suits to blend into the crowds. He’s not like other Gangsters of the period like Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.) a showboating, loud dresser who carries around copies of his press clippings. In one scene Lucas sees one of his cousins wearing a loud outfit and tells him to take it saying “Why are you wearing a suit that screams arrest me.” He says this in such a way that’s part concerned relative with a hint of something else behind his eyes.

This film isn’t as violent as you would expect, but the few moments there are, makes you yell “now that’s straight gangster.” The pacing of this movie is almost perfect, every time you start to imagine that Lucas is nothing more than an American businessman Director Ridley Scott will throw in a moment where you see exactly how brutal Lucas really is, or a scene of how his drug dealing is impacting his community.

What separates Lucas from every other Drug dealer at the time is, he’s smart and will do anything, but he also understands that at the end of the day he’s running a business. When he has trouble with the local tradesmen, he decides to go directly to the source of the drug trade, which is Vietnam and is smart enough to use Vietnam soldiers to import the stuff back into the states. Then he brands his product as well.

Trying to stop him is a down and out beat cop Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) who gets into trouble earlier in his career by returning a million dollars in unmarked bills, his fellow Officers don’t trust him because an honest cop can be dangerous to a corrupt department.

Crowe is one of those actors who I really don’t like, I’ve always felt him to be overrated and frankly I’ve hated all his films from “A Beautiful Mind,” to “Master and Commander,” he gives another one of his patented Crowe performances, but here it works. Roberts is downtrodden, he’s in the middle of a nasty custody fight, and he has to defend his friendship with his childhood friend who happens to be a local mob boss.

The film spends as much time showing us Roberts’s life as it does Franks, but it’s there to show the sharp contrast between predator and prey. In this case Lucas thinks he is a predator and he has no idea that he’s really the prey. Roberts goes after Lucas but the film never goes “Hollywood,” where you have the stereotypical confrontation. No, Lucas has no idea Roberts exists that alone a reason to fear him. It’s like Heat where Pacino and De Niro don’t appear onscreen together until the end.

There’s a weird coda to the film that almost make everything seem sort of anti-climatic even when Roberts finally nabs Lucas it feels weird because again, Lucas never knew he was being hunted and had no clue who Roberts was, but somehow this felt more real to me than other Gangster films. What really surprised me was, apparently this film is based on a true person.

American Gangster is by far the best film of the year with stand out performances from Crowe and Washington.

Final Grade A

EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted Nov. 2, 2007

Ah, Feast of Love, what is there to say about this overlong, pretentious rumination on the many forms of Love? Morgan Freeman gives one of his textbook quiet performances as a retired professor, Harry Stevenson, who sits around and observes life through the eyes of others in a small Oregon town.

His friends are all sort of misfits who are in different stages of love, his friend Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear) thinks he’s happily married and is so oblivious to what is going on in his relationship that he fails to notice when a woman hits on his wife Kathryn (Selma Blair) , so he’s shocked when she asks him for a divorce. Then there’s love in its purest form as represented by his young friends Chloe (Alexa Davalos) and Tobey (Toby Hemingway). There really isn’t much plot here to spoil it’s about three different generations in love.

The film is quiet and contemplative as we watch these three generations go through the motions of love and life. We understand and get that Bradley is a misfit at love, he constantly falls for the wrong women, after he gets over the trauma of his divorce he falls for the his real estate agent, Diana (Radha Mitchell) who is having wild sex with a married man, David Watson (Billy Burke).

Sometimes when I go to the movies and you see characters on the screen that have these amazing, incredibly unrealistic lives, I can’t help but wonder wouldn’t it be great to see a Romantic Comedy or Drama where everyone lead boring, bland lives like we do in the real world? Well “Feast of Love,” answers this question, our lives would make for really long, drawn out boring movies where nothing much happens.

At least this film has characters that I like and remind me of real life friends of mine. But it doesn’t mean I would want their lives made into a film. There’s no real point or reason for this film’s existence. There’s not enough meat here to keep you satisfied. It tries and desperately wants to make a statement, but I wasn’t quite sure what that statement was. It wasn’t as simple as “Love Sucks,” as evidenced by David’s many problems, and it wasn’t that “Love is Everlasting,” as shown through the eyes of Bradley and it wasn’t “Love is Passion,” as shown by young Chloe and Tobey.

In many ways the three interlocking stories show Love in many stages, from young love to middle age where you experience problems and issues to old age (assuming you get through those problems). It’s hardly the revelatory concept that Writer/Director Robert Benton (best known for one of my all time favorite - and earliest film memory Kramer Vs. Kramer - to this day my mother still calls me a “spoiled little shit” because of that movie) came up with.

You really have to be in the right frame of mind to watch this film. It’s one of those movies that I’ll probably appreciate better on television in the comfort of my own home, than trapped in a theater for two hours.

Final Grade C

EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 9/28/07